There are many options for email service today, and Nerds On Site offers and support some of the biggest and best. Today we’d like to make a quick comparison between two of them: our shared email services and Google Apps. Our shared email service is built on SmarterMail 8 Enterprise. To give a quick overview, lets take a look at 7 comparison points:
- Storage
Google Apps provides business users with 25GB of storage, but it’s important to keep in mind that files you have in Google Docs counts towards this total storage number. Currently, our shared email services offer unlimited storage, with a few of our clients currently using over 50GB of storage per mailbox. - Calendaring and Task Management
Google Calendar allows you to easily share calendars with colleagues, and also create shared calendars for a team approach. Google Calendar also includes a task management tool, though it is a bit underpowered at this time. For example, tasks can be easily added with due dates, but not easily shared with co-workers. By comparison, our shared mail platform offers a very robust and mature task management system, allowing for tasks to be colour coded, grouped and sorted. Emails can be converted to tasks and you can easily see the history of all emails sent or received between you and someone in your address book. The calendar in SmarterMail is also very robust, allowing for shared calendars and even includes a built-in 7 day weather forecast. - Spam Filtering, Security and Reliability
Our team have vastly improved SmarterMail’s already strong reputation as a enterprise-class application by integrating SpamExperts‘s amazing spam filtering into our shared email offering. All clients are protected by SpamExperts 99.98% accurate spam filter, with daily spam quarantine reports. In addition, email archiving is available to ensure that you meet all regulatory requirements. Google’s spam filtering features a community-driven system, which generally works quite well. Some criticism has been levelled at Google for showing ads in their mail interface that is driven by keywords in your email, potentially violating your privacy. Reliability of Google mail is pretty good with only a few widely publicized disruptions in it’s service. By comparison, we publicly publish our availability statistics at trust.nerdsisp.com. - Usability
The Google webmail system loads very fast, with Google placing a premium on efficiency and load time. The SmarterMail webmail interface isn’t as quick loading as Google mail, but is very slick and familiar as it is modelled after some of the most popular email desktop clients. - Mobile Access
Gmail offers a version optimized for mobile devices as well as the ability to sync with iOS and Android devices. Our shared email platform also offers tight integration with many mobile devices, including Blackberry, iOS and Android devices.
Google Apps is a very different product than our shared email platform, and it has many more features not discussed here, including Google Docs. Every business has different needs, and we have many email solutions that we can offer you, from shared email to hosted Exchange services from AppRiver. Get in contact with our team to learn just which solution might best suit your needs!
